Early in Debra
Rienstra's new book on becoming a mother, the aptly titled Great With
Child, there's an obscure passage from the Old Testament book of Proverbs
that serves as a launching pad for all that follows.

There are three
things that are never satisfied, four that never say, "Enough!":
the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water,
and fire, which never says, "Enough!"

In the book Rienstra
says simply: "The longing to create life is elemental, on the level
of fire, earth, and death. The steadily humming tissues and organs,
as they play out their unconscious patterns, long to serve something
spiritual, to touch the eternal. It does not seem strange to me, then,
that our physical bodies lean hard, with our souls, toward the eternal."

In that context
it does not seem strange then that Rienstra decided to document her
third, and final, pregnancy with such detail and precision as to inspire
an almost 300-page book, due out in early April from Putnam/Tarcher.

"After my
first two children were born," she says, "I remembered their
births with a sort of nostalgia. With this I wanted to savor every moment
of the experience. Also, most books on pregnancy and birth treat it
as merely a medical event, physical changes and fetal development. I
wanted to read something that treated motherhood in the fullness of
its dimensions - - social and personal, body, mind and soul. Sometimes,
as all mothers know, if something must get done you have to do it yourself.
So I started writing."

Consequently, Great
With Child is a wide-ranging recounting of a journey that began with
thinking about becoming pregnant and concluded, in the book, with the
baby's first birthday. It's a combination of a devotional, a first-person
pregnancy account and more with pregnancy as the pivot point.

Early reviews of
the book have been glowing.

A recent Publishers
Weekly handed Great With Child a starred review, saying: "The book's
greatest strength, however, is that she never strays far from her own
narrative. Though she spent more than a year revising her manuscript,
each chapter reflects her thoughts and feelings as the events she describes
unfolded. As
such, her memoir tells the truth in a way that few books about parenthood
do. Rather than recounting her story long after it happened and/or intepreting
it to support a particular parenting philosophy, she simply records
how things felt as they occurred. A new or expectant mother is much
more likely to find herself, and thereby solace, in these pages than
in how-to books written by those for whom the sleeplessness and tumult
of infant care is a distant memory."

That, says Rienstra,
is the idea. In fact she says those first acts of simply recording events
and feelings led to the book's often eclectic nature, where Shakespeare,
the Bible, Sesame Street, C.S. Lewis, Star Trek (she's a self-confessed
Trekkie), medieval art and more all weave in and out of the narrative
at their pleasure. Some of the references were things that have been
in her head for years (I walk through life with texts in my head she
says), while others required extensive research in a wide variety of
anthologies and publications.

"I kept finding
that there weren't really any dead ends," she says. "Everything
seemed relevant. I was bringing a new person into the world, so the
whole world was fair game."

That whole world
included her Calvin classrooms where the literature and poetry classes
that she teaches often enter into the book.

"I was actually
a little surprised," she says, "at how much my Calvin classes
enter into it. But one of the things I love about teaching is that the
texts that I teach are relevant to my own life. And that's one of the
things I try also to communicate to my students. These things we explore
together aren't confined to the classroom. They intersect with our lives
every day."

In fact, Rienstra
says teaching classes at Calvin while writing the book improved the
book. And writing the book improved her teaching.

"I teach creative
writing," she says, "so to have done a book and to have gone
through the process . . . it's very helpful."

Rienstra's not
sure what's next on her horizon. Philip, the subject of Great With Child,
is now almost three. She jokes that her next book will be called Further
Behind: A Day in the Life of a Mother. For now, however, she's enjoying
this book, her first, and savoring both the memories of its creation
and the moments of its arrival.